"He did. On a Friday. March the twelfth, 1965." She said it the way you say your own address. "And I'd had a fight with him. That's the part Edna doesn't know. That's the part nobody knows. Not even your father."
I didn't say anything. Oliver had come back down the stairs; I heard him rather than saw him, and then he jumped up onto the far end of the bench and sat there, beside my mother, his tail curled around his white feet.
"I had a recital," she said. "At the Oil City Woman's Club. I was playing a Chopin nocturne, the one in E-flat, of all things. Mama's favorite. I'd practiced it for five months. And Daddy couldn't come, because it was a Thursday and he worked Thursdays and he couldn't get anybody to switch with him. And I was sixteen, Libby, and I was so angry. I'd been angry all week. And on Friday at breakfast he said something, I don't even remember what, something kind, he was trying to make it up to me, and I said—" She stopped. She closed her eyes. "I said I didn't care if he ever came home at all."
"Mom."
"I know. I know. Sixteen-year-olds say things like that every day. I know that. I've known that for twenty years." Her voice was very quiet and very steady, the way it was when she was holding on to something with all her strength. "But I went to bed that night, and I lay there, and I'd decided that when Mama played the note I wasn't going to answer. To punish him. That was going to be my big revenge. I was going to lie there and not say it, and he'd stand in the kitchen and wait, and he'd know I was still mad. I lay there practicing it in my head. Not saying it."
She opened her eyes. They were shining in the streetlight.
"And the note never came. I lay there and lay there. Eleven-thirty. Eleven forty-five. Midnight. And no car, and no note. And then the phone rang downstairs. And I knew. Before Mama even picked it up, I knew."
She was crying now, but quietly, her hands still pressed flat on the envelope against her chest.
"And afterwards, after the funeral, Mama started playing it again. Every night. At the same time. Like nothing had happened. And I'd lie upstairs, and I'd hear it, and I could not say it. I couldn't. Because it meant, he's home, everybody's safe, you can sleep now, and that wasn't true anymore, it was never going to be true again, and I thought—I thought if I said it, it'd be like I was pretending. Like I was letting myself off. And some part of me, some stupid, sixteen-year-old part, thought that the last time I'd meant not to answer, he'd died. So what would happen if I did?" She laughed, a horrible little laugh. "That doesn't make sense. I know it doesn't make any sense."
"It makes sense," I said.
She looked at me.